Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

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This enthralling book will take you, month-by-month, day-by-day, through all the festivities of English life. From national celebrations such as New Year&rsquo;s Eve to regional customs such as the Padstow Hobby Horse procession, cheese rolling in Gloucestershire and Easter Monday bottle kicking in Leeds, it explains how they originated, what they mean and when they occur. 
 
A fascinating guide to the richness of our heritage and the sometimes eccentric nature of life in England, The English Year offers a unique chronological view of our social customs and attitudes

The English Year

Cameron Spence

With the outbreak of Gulf War hostilities a unit from 22 SAS slipped quietly over the border and into the enemy's backyard. It would be six weeks before any of the patrol again reached safety. 
 
Sabre Squadron recounts in graphic detail their scud-busting operations deep inside Iraq. They were operating alone and out of reach of reinforcements, with the threat of detection and its fatal consequences ever present. Yet their determination to wreak havoc behind enemy lines remained undimmed, culminating in an attack that decisively reconfirmed the regiment's awesome reputation. 
 
Cameron Spence, a senior NCO on the operation, takes you as close to the fighting SAS as you are ever likely to get, conveying the relentless tension, black humour and camaraderie punctuated by explosive, nerve-shredding action that characterized the mission. 
 
This is the true story of an SAS operation of breathtaking audacity and flair, carried out under unimaginable pressure, in the face of impossible odds.

Sabre Squadron

Tristram Hunt

Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the greatest English potter who ever lived, epitomized the best of his age. From his kilns and workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, he revolutionized the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing efficiency and retail flair. He transformed the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool, Bath and Dublin but of America and the world, and helping to usher in a mass consumer society. Tristram Hunt calls him 'the Steve Jobs of the eighteenth century'. 
 
But Wedgwood was radical in his mind and politics as well as in his designs. He campaigned for free trade and religious toleration, read pioneering papers to the Royal Society and was a member of the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham. Most significantly, he created the ceramic 'Emancipation Badge', depicting a slave in chains and inscribed 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' that became the symbol of the abolitionist movement. 
 
Tristram Hunt's hugely enjoyable new biography, strongly based on Wedgwood's notebooks, letters and the words of his contemporaries, brilliantly captures the energy and originality of Wedgwood and his extraordinary contribution to the transformation of eighteenth-century Britain.

The Radical Potter

Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain

Noreen Masud

Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes - their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the 'flat place' she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain's landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. 
 
Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

A Flat Place

Stephanie Shirley

Richard Askwith

In 1962, Stephanie "Steve" Shirley founded an IT software company when the concept of software barely existed. The company created huge opportunities for women in tech, allowing them to work on projects like the programming of the black box flight recorder from the comfort of their own home. The business thrived and Shirley gradually transferred ownership of the company to those who worked for it, creating 70 millionaires in the process. 
 
Let it Go explores Shirley's trail blazing career as an entrepreneur but it also charts her incredible personal story - her dramatic arrival in England as an unaccompanied Kindertransport refugee from Germany and the tragic death of her son, Giles, who suffered severely from Autism. Today, Dame Stephanie Shirley is one of Britain's leading philanthropists, devoting most of her time, energy and money to supporting and creating charities in the areas of Autism and STEM. This is an engrossing story of an extraordinary life, filled with lessons in what it means to be human.

Let It Go

My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist

Ahron Bregman

Ehud Barak's election as Prime Minister of Israel on 17th May 1999 and his determination to conclude a peace deal with the Palestinians inspired both Israeli voters and the international community. So where did it all go wrong? How did it end, less than two years later, in the total failure of Barak's peace efforts, his defeat at the polls and ejection from office? How did he open the way not to peace, but to Ariel Sharon? 
 
Drawing on exclusive interviews with all the major international figures involved, this book traces the history of the Middle East peace process from Barak's election, through the peace talks at Camp David to the current Road Map. It illuminates the characters of Clinton, Arafat, Sharon and many others, and offers many insights into one of the most complex political political situations in the world today.

Elusive Peace

How the Holy Land Defeated America

Steve Coll

The Bin Ladens are shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most closed, unaccountable countries on earth. Little has been known about the world that created Osama - until now. 
 
In this gripping account prizewinning journalist Steve Coll has interviewed those closest to the family who rose from Yemeni peasants to jetsetting millionaires in two generations. In doing so, he reveals a Saudi Arabia torn between religious purity and the temptations of the West, telling a story of oil, money, power, patronage and dangerous cultural extremes.

The Bin Ladens

Oil, Money, Terrorism and the Secret Saudi World

Roald Dahl

'They didn't think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton; and they were apparently astounded whn they came upon my still-breathing body, lying in the sand near by' 
 
In 1938 Roald Dahl was fresh out of school and bound for his first job in Africa, hoping to find adventure far from home. However, he got far more excitement than he bargained for when the outbreak of the Second World War led him to join the RAF. His account of his experiences in Africa, crashing a plane in the Western Desert, rescue and recovery from his horrific injuries in Alexandria, and many other daring deeds, recreates a world as bizarre and unnerving as any he wrote about in his fiction.

Going Solo

Bee Wilson

Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the 'Kitchen Thinker' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live. 
 
This is the story of how we have tamed fire and ice, wielded whisks, spoons, graters, mashers, pestles and mortars, all in the name of feeding ourselves. Bee Wilson takes us on an enchanting culinary journey through the incredible creations, inventions and obsessions that have shaped how and what we cook. From huge Tudor open fires to sous-vide machines, the birth of the fork to Roman gadgets, Consider the Fork is the previously unsung history of our kitchens. 
 
Bee Wilson writes a weekly food column, 'The Kitchen Thinker' in The Sunday Telegraph, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year. Her previous books include The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled!. Before she became a food writer, she was a Research Fellow in History at St John's College, Cambridge. She has also been a semi-finalist on Masterchef. Her favourite kitchen implement is currently the potato ricer. 
 
'A cracking good read, as enjoyable as it is enlightening' Raymond Blanc, Chef-Patron 'Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons' 
 
'Wonderful ... Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity' Lucy Lethbridge, Observer 
 
'[A] delightfully informative history of cooking and eating from the prehistoric discovery of fire to twenty-first-century high-tech, low-temp soud-vide-style cookery' ELLE magazine 
 
'A graceful study' Steven Poole, Guardian

Consider the Fork

A History of How We Cook and Eat

Kevin Birmingham

In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? 
 
The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appal and entice us today. Thrilling and definitive, this is the story of a masterpiece.

The Sinner and the Saint

Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment

The news-breaking book that has sent schockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. 
 
Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bn Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.

Ghost Wars

The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden

Eugene Rogan

Eugene Rogan has written an authoritative new history of the Arabs in the modern world. Starting with the Ottoman conquests in the sixteenth century, this landmark book follows the story of the Arabs through the era of European imperialism and the Superpower rivalries of the Cold War, to the present age of unipolar American power. Drawing on the writings and eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the tumultuous years of Arab history, The Arabs balances different voices - politicians, intellectuals, students, men and women, poets and novelists, famous, infamous and the completely unknown - to give a rich, complex sense of life over nearly five centuries. 
 
Rogan's book is remarkable for its geographical sweep, covering the Arab world from North Africa through the Arabian Peninsula, and for the depth in which it explores every facet of modern Arab history. Charting the evolution of Arab identity from Ottomanism to Arabism to Islamism, it covers themes including the conflict between national independence and foreign domination, the Arab-Israeli struggle and the peace process, Abdel Nasser and the rise of Arab Nationalism, the political and economic power of oil and the conflict between secular and Islamic values.

The Arabs

A History – Revised and Updated Edition

Updated Fourth Edition

A History – Third Edition

In war are we at our heroic best or our cowardly worst? Featuring the autobiographical stories from Roald Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War as well as seven other tales of conflict and strife, Dahl reveals the human side of our darkest days. 
 
Among other stories, you'll read about the pilot shot down in the Libyan desert, the fighter plane lost in mysterious thick cloud and the soldier who returns from war but has been mysteriously changed by it. 
 
Roald Dahl reveals even more about the darker side of human nature in seven other centenary editions: Lust, Madness, Cruelty, Deception, Trickery, Innocence and Fear.

Nathan Thrall

Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits: his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad's fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as a Palestinian. 
 
Interwoven with Abed's odyssey are the stories of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and pasts unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. 
 
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a deeply immersive, stunningly detailed portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, and an illumination of the reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

A Palestine Story

William D. Cohan

William D. Cohan's The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères &amp; Co. is the astonishing story of the world's most elite and legendary investment bank - and the men who reigned over it all. 
 
 For over 150 years Lazard Frères had stood apart from other Wall Street firms by offering ultra-wealthy clients the wisdom of its 'Great Men': from Felix Rohatyn, the escapee from Nazi-occupied France turned financial genius, to Michel David-Weill, the inscrutable French billionaire 'Sun King'; from Steve Rattner, the boy wonder from Long Island who clashed violently with the old guard, to larger-than-life CEO Bruce Wasserstein, 'Bid-Em-Up-Bruce', who broke with the bank's traditions and made himself billions in the process. They amassed unimaginable fortunes and would stop at nothing to make a deal, until their titanic egos started to jeopardize everything. 
 
 In The Last Tycoons William Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes us into their mysterious and secretive world, telling a story of ruthless ambition, whispered advice, explosive feuds, glamorous mistresses, decadent excesses and unimaginable wealth. 
 
 'Spellbinding' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'A definitive account ... it lives up to the billing' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Times 
 
 'Has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Wall Street Journal 
 
 William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. His first book, The Last Tycoons, about Lazard, won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was a New York Times bestseller. His second book, House of Cards, also a bestseller, is an account of the last days of Bear Stearns &amp; Co. He is also the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.

The Last Tycoons

The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

Eugene Rogan's remarkable book recreates one of the most important but poorly understood fronts of the First World War. For four centuries the Ottoman Empire had been one of the most powerful states in Europe as well as ruler of the Middle East. By 1914 it had been drastically weakened and circled by numerous predators waiting to finish it off. Following the Ottoman decision to join the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, the British, French and Russians hatched a plan to finish the Ottomans off: an ambitious and unprecedented invasion of Gallipoli . . .

The Fall of the Ottomans

The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920

Quentin Blake

It was truly the most breathless and in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life. 
 
 
This beautiful edition of Going Solo, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, features official archive material from the Roald Dahl Museum and is perfect for Dahl fans old and new. 
 
So, enter a world where invention and mischief can be found on every page and where magic might be at the very tips of your fingers . . . 
 
The Roald Dahl Classic Collection reinstates the versions of Dahl’s books that were published before the 2022 Puffin editions, aimed at newly independent young readers.

Dan Mills

We all saw it at once. Half a dozen voices screamed 'Grenade!' simultaneously. Then everything went into slow motion. The grenade took an age to travel through its 20 metre arc. A dark, small oval-shaped package of misery the size of a peach ... 
 
April 2004: Dan Mills and his platoon of snipers fly into southern Iraq, part of an infantry battalion sent to win hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives. 
 
Back home we were told they were peacekeeping. But there was no peace to keep. Because within days of arriving in theatre, Mills and his men were caught up in the longest, most sustained fire fight British troops had faced for over fifty years. 
 
This awe-inspiring account tells of total war in throat-burning winds and fifty-degree heat, blasted by mortars and surrounded by heavily armed militias. For six months, they fought alone: isolated, besieged and under constant enemy fire. Their heroic stand a modern-day Rorke's Drift.

Sniper One

‘The Best I’ve Ever Read’ – Andy McNab

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. 
 
Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. 
 
But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital. 
 
This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

The Damascus Events

The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World

Winner of the the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction 
 
'Spellbinding ... a magisterial account of the great tragedy of our age ... it is a classic' Evening Standard 
'In the finest traditions of American investigative journalism' The Times 
'Spectacular ... makes Bourne movies pale in comparison' Financial Times 
 
From the Pulitzer Prize winning of the acclaimed Ghost Wars, this is the full story of America's grim involvement in the affairs of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016. In the wake of the terrible shock of 9/11, the C.I.A. scrambled to work out how to destroy Bin Laden and his associates. The C.I.A. had long familiarity with Afghanistan and had worked closely with the Taliban to defeat the Soviet Union there. A tangle of assumptions, old contacts, favours and animosities were now reactivated. Superficially the invasion was quick and efficient, but Bin Laden's successful escape, together with that of much of the Taliban leadership, and a catastrophic failure to define the limits of NATO's mission in a tough, impoverished country the size of Texas, created a quagmire which lasted many years. 
 
At the heart of the problem lay 'Directorate S', a highly secretive arm of the Pakistan state which had its own views on the Taliban and Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between Pakistan, India and China, and which assumed that the U.S.A. and its allies would soon be leaving. 
 
Steve Coll's remarkable new book tells a powerful, bitter story of just how badly foreign policy decisions can go wrong and of many lives lost.

Directorate S

The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016

Carlo Rovelli

Over two millennia ago, a Greek philosopher had a number of wondrous insights that paved the way to cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. Anaximander's legacy includes the revolutionary idea that the earth floats in a void, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, that animals evolved, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. He introduced a new mode of rational thinking with an openness to uncertainty and to the progress of knowledge. 
 
In this elegant work, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander's overlooked legacy to modern science. He examines Anaximander as a scientist interested in shedding light on the deep nature of scientific thinking, which Rovelli locates in his rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again. Anaximander celebrates the radical lack of certainty that defines the scientific quest for knowledge.

Anaximander

And the Nature of Science

Chris Froome

WINNER OF THE 2018 GIRO D'ITALIA! 
 
THREE TIME WINNER OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE. 
 
THE FIRST MAN SINCE BERNARD HINAULT TO HOLD THE MAGLIA ROSA, THE MAILLOT JAUNE AND THE MAILLOT ROJO AT THE SAME TIME. 
 
This is Chris Foome in his own words. 
 
'Engaging, vividly evoked' Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 
 
'What Chris has done is phenomenal' Sir Chris Hoy 
 
Sunday Times Bestseller, July 2014

The Climb

The Autobiography

Spike Milligan

'I had not informed my parents of my return, I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was, for me, they were away ...' 
 
The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy ... but to what? Aside from shooting large, inaccurate guns at Germans, all he has done for five long years is blow a trumpet, tell rude jokes and write and perform sketches for the entertainment of bored and murderous soldiers - who on earth is going to pay a civilian to do more of that? From the giddy heights of Hackney Empire to a Zurich Freak Show and beyond, Spike makes his way through the backwaters of showbiz, first as band musician then as one-man wild-act and eventually in the company of a group of like-minded comedians called Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. They decide to call themselves The Goons...

Peace Work

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its ruinous, decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. 
 
Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons programme, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives through understanding his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader - a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of many more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances in his paranoia, resentments and inconsistencies - even when the stakes were incredibly high. 
 
Using unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, The Achilles Trap is a remarkable picture of a dictator who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, it is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy and vanity - on both sides - led to avoidable errors of statecraft: ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change our political landscape.

The Achilles Trap

Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003

Serhii Plokhy

On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital - and an extraordinarily reckless plan after the disaster that had taken place there three decades earlier. Russian occupation of the plant had begun. It would last thirty-five days. 
 
Closely reported and narrated from multiple perspectives, this is the story of the Ukrainians who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days to spare the world a new nuclear accident. We meet Valentyn Heiko, the foreman who had also been there for the clean-up of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and turned sixty during the occupation; plant workers who found a way to celebrate International Women’s Day despite all odds; Russian officers who had no knowledge of nuclear reactors; and four stalkers who were caught in the middle and stood in for the overworked cook. 
 
Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that reads like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

Chernobyl Roulette

A War Story

Harvey Whitehouse

‘Insightful and breathtaking’ YUVAL NOAH HARARI, author of Sapiens 
‘Bold and sweeping’ PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads 
‘Profoundly thought-provoking’ KATE RAWORTH, author of Doughnut Economics 
 
How has humans' evolutionary inheritance shaped global society? 
 
Why are humans everywhere prone to believe in ghosts? 
How might our tendency to imitate one another be contributing to the climate catastrophe? 
And does our deep evolutionary past impel us to vote for strongmen? 
 
In 1987, Harvey Whitehouse went to live with an indigenous community deep in the Papua New Guinea rainforest. His experiences there convinced him that, far from being wildly different, humans are fundamentally alike: their beliefs and behaviours rooted in a set of evolutionary urges that can be found in any society, anywhere. 
 
Here, Whitehouse roves across twelve millennia and five continents to uncover how these evolved urges have both shaped and been reshaped by human history. Along the way, he shows that this ancient inheritance does not just hold the key to explaining the modern world – but perhaps also to changing it. 
 
__ 
 
‘Ranges widely across disciplines and timescales to formulate an exhilarating narrative of human history . . . Enthralling and mind-expanding’ IRISH TIMES 
 
‘Profoundly important . . . Whitehouse shows how evolution sculpted our psychological make-up, how we overcame its limitations over the course of world history, and how we can wield this knowledge to face the challenges of the future’ LEWIS DARTNELL, author of Being Human 
 
‘A very powerful, provocative and inspiring analysis of the human condition . . . Compelling and highly readable, this book shows why anthropology matters’ GILLIAN TETT, Financial Times columnist and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge 
 
‘A thought provoking look at social forces, and the ways ordinary people can change the world’ GUARDIAN

Inheritance

The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World

Rosita Boland

'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are: 
 
A close companion. 
An intimate associate or friend. 
 
The third one is: 
A fellow soldier. 
 
My friends have been all those things to me.' 
 
In this stunning essay collection, award-winning journalist Rosita Boland explores the many friendships that have shaped her life. Surprising and beautiful, she writes about the imaginary friends of early childhood, books that have provided companionship and joy, kindred spirits met while travelling, the friend she hoped might become something more, and also the friendships that become lost over time. 
 
Life-affirming, affecting and wise, Comrades is a powerful exploration of what it is to live, to connect, and to be human in this world.

Comrades

A Lifetime of Friendships

Rodney Foster

"Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?" Not Colonel Rodney Foster, a platoon commander of the Kent Home Guard. 
 
Dad's Army, the iconic comedy series is as well-known today as it was forty years ago. But the reality of life in the Home Guard was often very different. Living directly beneath the Battle of Britain on the Kent coast, Colonel Rodney Foster, who illegally kept a diary every day of the War, commanded a company of men in the face of constant aerial bombardment and the ever-present threat of death from above - the Home Guard were the first barrier to Hitler's crack parachutists. Writing from the village hall, abandoned barns, churches and makeshift officers' messes, he records with a unique wit and wisdom the everyday details of family life during the war: the domestic routine dogged by air raid warnings, the antics of soldiers stationed nearby taking every chance to improve their lot, the quiet strength of a small community faced with great adversity.

The Real 'Dad's Army'

The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster

Minoo Dinshaw

In his enormously long life (he was born in 1903 and died in 2000), Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and plottings entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny. 
 
Outlandish Knight is a dazzling debut by a writer who has prodigious gifts, but who also has had the ability to spot one of the great biographical subjects. This is an extremely funny book about a man who attracted the strangest experiences, but also a very serious one: about the rigours of a life spent both in the distant past and in the harsh world of the twentieth century in which so much of what he studied and cherished across the Balkans and Asia Minor was subjected to rapid and often catastrophic change.

Outlandish Knight

The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman

Paul Tremelling

This is the story of what it takes to make it in fighter combat. In the cockpit or crew room, the pressure is relentless, the humour merciless. 
It's no place for the faint-hearted. 
 
Whether landing on a pitching aircraft carrier deck at midnight, or 
saving heroes under fire in Afghanistan, there is no room for self-doubt; only confidence and do-or-die hard truth. In return, Paul Tremelling and his comrades enjoyed levels of exhilaration unimaginable anywhere else. 
 
Combining visceral action with sharp intelligence, laced with acerbic humour, 
Harrier brings to life the hi-octane, unforgiving world of the fighter pilot. 
 
Strap in...

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